The Impact of Information Structure on Strategic Behavior in Queueing Systems

Abstract

The study of strategic customer behavior in service systems constitutes an important and dynamic trend in queueing theory. Indeed, the optimal design and control of service systems in real-life applications of queueing theory requires that the strategic dimension of customers is taken into account. Under this perspective, the customers are decision makers that aim to maximize their benefit, taking into account that the others have similar objectives. Therefore, the overall situation can be seen as a game among the customers and the administrator of the system. A central problem is how a social planner or a monopolist should act to incite customers to adopt a desirable behavior, one that increases the social welfare or the monopolist’s revenue/profit, respectively. However, the intervention of a social planner and/or a monopolist should be indirect, as direct forcing of customers is considered unacceptable in the framework of a free market. To this end, several mechanisms have been proposed, e.g. pricing structures, priority systems and non-standard queueing disciplines. An important mechanism is the control of information that is provided to the customers. In this chapter, we will present several techniques for the control of information in a given system and their impact on strategic customer behavior, the throughput, the social welfare and a monopolist’s revenue. These ideas will be explained in the simplest possible framework and then several extensions will be discussed. An overview of the corresponding literature is also included.